Jewish groups push to find Holocaust mass graves

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January 21, 2011 4:56:42 AM PST

BERLIN, Germany --

Several Jewish organizations say they've started an effort to identify, protect and memorialize thousands of forgotten Holocaust mass graves across eastern Europe. Rabbi Andrew Baker of the American Jewish Committee said Friday in Berlin that Germany's Foreign Ministry has granted euro300,000 ($404,000) to support the project.

The committee will coordinate work by dozens of groups on the ground in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and Poland that talk to witnesses, identify mass graves, protect them, and establish memorials.

Even before organized mass killings of Jews at the gas chambers in death camps like Auschwitz and Belzec began, hundreds of thousands of Jews in eastern Europe were rounded up by the German military, shot and buried in countless mass graves.